Throughout the nine independent parts in this essay, the same characters return and meet: Stravinski and Kafka with their curious friends; Janacek and Hemingway; Rabelais and important novelists. The art of the novel is the principal hero of the book: the spirit of the humour from which it was born; its mysterious relationship with music; its history which proceeds (like that of the music) in three times; the aesthetics of the third time (the modern novel). And then the existential wisdom of the novel. In this light, the grand situations of our era are examined: moral lawsuits brought against the art of the century; generalized indiscretion announcing the twilight of individualism; betrayed wills (of Europe, art, art of the novel, authors).